Diana Zwibach was born to Jewish parents in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1948. Zwibach moved to London in 1971 when she received a scholarship to complete a postgraduate diploma in Printmaking from the Chelsea School of Art. She continued her studies, completing an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, and relocated to northern England, while continuing to practice and exhibit her work in the UK and overseas.
Artist Diana Zwibach was born to Jewish parents in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1948. Zwibach’s father, Tibor Zwibach, was a talented radiologist who was much in demand. In 1961, her family moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and then to Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1964, so that her father could take up a post at Chaim Sheba Hospital and a lectureship at Tel Aviv University. Carrying the trauma of losing his parents, sister, and niece in Auschwitz during the Second World War, Tibor Zwibach lived in fear of losing his wife and only daughter. He subsequently evacuated them both from Israel temporarily to Rome during the Six-Day War in 1967. While living in Israel, Zwibach completed her Bachelor’s degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 1971, she obtained a scholarship to complete a postgraduate diploma in Printmaking at Chelsea School of Art and moved to London. She subsequently completed a Master’s degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1974. Having participated in several group exhibitions, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in 1973 and 1974 (as Diana Cvibah), she held her first solo show at the Ben Uri Gallery, London in 1973. Zwibach met her husband, Anthony Febland, and moved north to Blackpool in 1975. She continued to develop her artistic practice and to exhibit both internationally and in the UK. She later showed again at the Ben Uri Gallery as part of the Jewish Artists Awards in 2001 and in the International Jewish Artists of the Year Award (IJAYA) in 2004.
Zwibach uses a variety of media in her art, including collage, painting, printmaking, and charcoal drawing, constantly changing, adapting, and experimenting with her approaches and styles. Her work tends to be figurative and utilises repeated motifs - particularly of animals, plants, and anthropomorphic or organic figures - to create a fluid kind of symbolism. As described on her website profile: ‘Her works are distinguished by their complex and dramatic narratives which take both real and imagined stories as their source material. Zwibach develops the narratives through an organic approach to painting and printmaking; the figures change fluidly to form an exciting and explosive colourful crescendo.’ (Zwibach website, About Me) Often, Zwibach draws on deeply emotional personal experiences to create expressive pieces that incorporate strong narratives exploring various themes relating to the human condition, including connection and distance, love and fear, and a sensation of anxiety and powerlessness when caught in the currents of socio-political events throughout history. Her work may allude to her her personal experiences as part of a family of Holocaust victims and survivors and the impact it had on her father’s emotional state, as well as her own encounters with war and instability. For example, in Ethiopia, where her family witnessed a failed coup against Emperor Haile Selassie; her evacuation from Israel with her mother during the Six-Day War in the 1960s; and, later, the pain, suffering, and destruction of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, given her birthplace in the former Yugoslavia. Her art captures an introspective attempt to reconcile personal life stories with broader socio-political histories that affect individuals, but lie outside individual control.
Zwibach’s husband died just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. She described how the grief she experienced, compounded by the subsequent pressures and isolation of the pandemic, induced a state of mental and physical collapse. As she began her recovery, Zwibach explored this breakdown and the subsequent rebuilding of her life and work in her 2022 exhibition No Callback at Summerhall, Edinburgh. There, she exhibited works consisting of paintings, drawings, and prints that she had torn apart and reassembled as collages, adding additional elements in a ritualistic dismantling of the past. The fragments of destruction constituted a new body of work, representing a symbolic process of healing. In recent years, she has continued her work and exhibited internationally, including in her birthplace, Novi Sad. Diana Zwibach lives and works in Blackpool, Lancashire and is represented by the Diana Febland Gallery. In the UKk public domain, her artworks are held in the collections of the Cunningham Museum in Scotland and The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Diana Zwibach]
Publications related to [Diana Zwibach] in the Ben Uri Library